Capture credit card fees paid by my business

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1

I’m using Tiller for managing my business accounting. I receive credit card payments through Square, Venmo, and Paypal. But so far, I have only been tracking the actual money that the business receives to my bank account through those services. So, I need to go back to the services to capture credit card processing fees and adjust my revenue accordingly. In other words, the client pays a higher sum than I have been tracking and the processing fees should be expensed. Is there a simple way to do this to integrate into the existing Tiller Google Sheets? I predominantly used “Transactions,” “Spending Trends” and “Simple P&L” so far.

2

You’re right about needing to itemize your business transactions so you can account for things like processing fees. Consider using Saved Splits (link), where you can enter as many line items as you want, including the credit card processing fee. It’s not “integrated” and takes a little more input from you, but by using Saved Splits, you can automate and standardize your Descriptions and Tags, if you use them, speeding up the process.

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Splits would work if I was getting the importing transaction from the credit card processor. Instead, I’m just importing bank deposits, so it leaves out the portion paid to the credit card processor completely. I tried using the CSV import template for the Venmo business account, but the instructions didn’t match the CSV document. I think I’ll just manually add one income and expense line for each month for each processor to reflect the income that paid the processing fees.

4

It’s okay that you’re only getting the bank deposit. Splitting the transaction allows you to create the credit card fee.

Here’s a basic example:

What shows up in the bank feed (single deposit)

  • + $970.00 deposit from PayPal

(This is the net amount after PayPal took its fee.)

What you would split it into with

Saved Splits

  1. + $1,000.00 – Revenue (Category: Income: Sales, Description: PayPal Payment)
  2. – $30.00 – Expense (Category: Fees: Credit Card Processing, Description: PayPal Fee)

That way:

  • Your P&L shows $1,000 in revenue (what the client actually paid).
  • Your P&L also shows $30 in fees (a business expense).
  • Your bank balance still matches because $1,000 – $30 = $970 deposit.

:backhand_index_pointing_right: And the nice thing about Saved Splits is you only have to set this up once per payment processor — after that you can just apply the same split template whenever you see a deposit from PayPal, Square, or Venmo.

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5

What I would suggest is what @brettanicus suggests here if you have a modest number of transactions, but if it’s a large volume, I would do the monthly adjustment idea of adding back the processing fees as both income and expense to get your monthly totals right without an excessive amount of effort.

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